


MAG160.5 - Shift

by AppropriateAsAlways



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Minor Spoilers, Spoiler MAG160, Statement Fic, The Buried - Freeform, The Spiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22168153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppropriateAsAlways/pseuds/AppropriateAsAlways
Summary: Case #9771103Statement of Sampson Thomas regarding his imprisonment in the Pottawattamie County Jail from 1925 to 1928.
Kudos: 13





	MAG160.5 - Shift

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little statement which I like to imagine John had as a snack between MAG160 and MAG161. Written just after S4 finished, so it might not be canon compliant when S5 releases. Vaguely references the events of MAG160/159 but will only make sense to those who listened to it – shouldn’t count as major spoilers.

[CLICK]

Statement of Sampson Thomas regarding his imprisonment in the Pottawattamie County Jail from 1925 to 1928. Original Statement given to The Usher Foundation on 3rd November 1977. Audio Recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivi-

[SLIGHT PAUSE]

The Archive.

Statement begins.

* * *

Listen, I know what I did was wrong. I known it was wrong when I did it. And I got asked, you know, on parole committee, if I felt bad about what I did. “I never shoulda done it,” I told them. “It was the worst mistake of my life. If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I woulda never robbed that store.” And that’s the truth. I’m not one for lyin, and I wasn’t one then neither.

The whole truth, though, is I don’t feel _bad_ about stealin from the guy. He was an ass, and I knew I wasn’t doin any real damage – insurance companies would’ve given him back everythin I stole, if I hadn’t got caught. But I do regret it. Not because I stole, not even because I got caught. No, I regret it because I got caught in Council Bluffs. And back in 1925, criminals in Council Bluffs got sent to The Squirrel Cage.

I know, “The Squirrel Cage” doesn’t sound like much - _sounds_ like the kind of thing you put on your birdfeeder to stop the bastards from stealin your suet. But in Pottawattamie, it’s where they kept all the lawbreakers – like me. And I mean, _all_ the lawbreakers. Now, the place was clearly a few decades old when I got there, and I doubt it’s gotten remodeled since. So, it was designed for a lot smaller town, and there wasn’t near enough room for all the folks in there. All of us was sharin cells. And they didn’t bother to discriminate between petty thieves and murderers. Matter of fact, I heard that they had Jake Bird in there a few decades back. Can you imagine havin your check bounce, so suddenly you gotta share bunks with an ax-murderer who’s got body-count of 46?

But that wasn’t the worst of it, nah. Overcrowdin happens everywhere and there’s always a few real bad apples in every jailhouse. No, see, what’s special about Squirrel Cage Jail is that all the cells rotated. The whole thing was three floors, like three pies stacked up on top of each other, each cell a little slice of the pie. And there was only one entrance into the pies on each level, a single empty doorway in a three-story wall made of metal bars. So, if you were gonna be let out, the guard had to rotate the whole contraption, all three floors at the same time, so the doorway lined up with your cell. And it wasn’t quick, neither. It was this, loud, slow thing where the gears screeched and ground away until your cell door finally aligned with the exit. The gears got stuck pretty often, so sometimes you’d be trapped in there for hours before they could get a repair guy in. ‘Course, regular folk never were in much of a rush for us criminals, and sometimes it took a full day to find a mechanic who would let us out.

Apparently, it was very cost efficient, which is why the Pottawattamie folks liked it. You only got to hire one guard to watch the three doorways, and all he needs is a gun. Nobody’s doing anythin suspicious, because you don’t have any privacy when you’re sittin behind a big wall of bars. And no one’s having any doing much thinkin or plannin, because you can’t sleep real good when the walls keep turnin and screechin every fifteen minutes. So, yeah, I can see why they kept it around, even after it was positively flogged by the local newspaper after it was built.

You’d’ve thought that would have gotten the place torn down pretty quick, but money’s a pretty motivator. It was still the only jail in Pottawattamie County when I got arrested, so that’s where I went. I shared a cell with a young lifer called Jacobs. Good cellmate, as far as they go; missin an arm, so I knew he couldn’t beat me in a fight, and pretty quiet most of the time. Talked in his sleep a whole lot, but I’m usually a pretty heavy sleeper. And honestly, no one at the Cage was ever sleepin much anyway.

Just so I’s clear, I been to prison before. I spent a few months in Crawford Penitentiary, a couple weeks in Harrison County, and almost a year in the Omaha jailhouse. But there was something different about The Squirrel Cage, and it wasn’t just the design. Sure, no one ever got enough sleep cause the guard kept rattlin us about during the night, spinnin us ‘round just to keep us on edge. And I know that the tighter you pack em, the likelier you are for someone to get killed. But even with all that, this place was different. This place was wrong.

My first night there started off normal enough. Jacobs was on bottom bunk, whisperin something or other about the “great turning” or somethin. I got used to it after a couple of weeks, but at that point, I was still kinda wary of him. Anyway, just as I was starting to drift off on top bunk, one of the prisoners started shoutin. Some new guy in the cell left of me started yellin at the guard that he needed to piss, tellin him to rotate his cell to the door. The guard didn’t respond, just layin back in his chair, and starin at the floor. I was only half watchin at first, but when the ruckus started, I decided to take a good look at the guy keepin us there.

I don’t really know how to describe the guy. He was… long and lanky, stretched-out arms and legs dangling off the chair he sat in, knees and elbows all helter skelter. His uniform hung on his body like a tent, too short for them gangly limbs, and his hair curled around his head in long, limp coils. He was toyin with his gun, all hypnotizin-like, long fingers twirlin it around in some strange dance that was somehow both borin and unnervin.

After a few minutes, the inmate got pissed, and started callin him names. He was shoutin all manner of insults, tellin’ him to “shift his lazy ass and go turn that crank.” Eventually, he threw something at the guard, likely a pebble he found in his cell. Even then, I knew that _that_ was a big mistake.

The guard stopped twirling his pistol, and everything in the prison sorta froze. Real slow-like, he lifted his head, uncoiling like a snake and starin at the prisoner. As he did, I felt something in my stomach turn, and suddenly I felt piss-drunk, reelin wildly as the room spun. I gripped the side of the bed and damn near fell out of the top bunk, tryin to warn the inmate. I managed my way down and staggered up to the bars, and then… then I saw that thing’s face.

Now, maybe it was just the shadows that night, but there was somethin _wrong_ about that man’s face. His features were all off-kilter: a misshapen nose, one eye higher than the other, and a crooked, empty smile. His eyes… well, they looked like they were moving, almost swirlin in on themselves.

And then the guard lifted his hand.

That crank was at least 10 paces away from the guard’s chair. So, by all means, he should’ve stood up and gone over it. But he… didn’t. He slowly unclenched his fist and his fingers, they just kept… comin. They kept opening up, unfurling like curtains or somethin, gettin longer and longer. They sorta fell and slithered across the floor, like one of them sidewinder snakes, until they got to the other side of the room. They inched their probing way up the wall until his fingers finally wrapped around the crank, across the room from the rest of him, still sittin and starin at us. Slowly, those horrible coils started turnin that crank, and the cells began to spin.

Suddenly the guy next to me started screamin, beggin the guard to stop. When I looked over, I could see his arm was stuck between the bars, right at the shoulder. I don’t know when he put his arm in there, but there it was, and if he couldn’t get it out in the next few seconds, well, let’s just say he’d be a southpaw for the rest of his life.

I was just about to yell at the guard, tryin to give the new guy some support, when suddenly a single hand clamped over my mouth, strong and steady, trappin the words on my tongue. Quietly, in my ear, I heard a voice gently shush me. I struggled, but there wasn’t breaking this grip. “Just close your eyes,” the voice said, “and listen.”

God knows why, I obeyed.

In that silence, I heard everything that happened. I heard the crushing, ripping sound of a limb being torn from its owner. I heard the wet thump of flesh dropping to the concrete floor. I heard the wild screams of the prisoner, incomprehensible and horrified. I heard those same screams slowly die out, as, bit by bit, his fate was sealed. When his voice finally stopped echoin madly around the chamber, I heard the drip of blood, falling from one story to the next. And far, far away, I think I heard somethin shatter in the back corner of my mind.

There was silence for a little while. After a few minutes, I dared to open my eyes. The guard was just standin there, watchin the blood swirl down the grate in the floor. Only when the flow had receded to a trickle did those impossible fingers uncoil back into its raised fist. As it scanned the prisoners, noiselessly daring anyone else to speak out of turn, I saw something terrifyin in its eyes: not bloodlust, not anger, not even pride. In those spiralin eyes, I just saw weariness. It was the same weariness I’d seen in coke fiends who couldn’t feel nothin no more, whose drug of choice no longer gave them any pleasure. Although I didn’t read the word until years later, in that thing’s eyes I think I saw some monstrous form of ennui.

When the guard’s head dropped back to its gun again, my nausea disappeared, just as quickly as it appeared. The hand covering my mouth disappeared too, and I turned to look at my captor, my cellmate. Jacobs stared blankly back at me for a few seconds, before something like a smile crossed his face. “A few gallons of blood to keep the wheel turning,” he said, and then turned back toward his bunk. Suddenly, I understood exactly where my cellmate’s other arm had disappeared to.

Not knowing what to say, I followed him to bed.

Things never really got much worse than that. Sure, sometimes the walls seemed to melt around you, sometimes you’d get lost in a single, empty room, sometimes the cells would turn for hundreds of rotations before reaching the doors. But the violence I experienced that first night never returned. In a rare moment of lucid conversation with Jacobs, a couple months in, he told me all I wanted to know about the Squirrel Cage. This madness, he told me, was things mellowing out. Five or ten years back, blood was getting spilled at _least_ once a day, and the prison itself was even worse. The halls to the dining centers turned endlessly in on themselves, and people got wandered for days in what should have been straight corridors to the showers. But over time, the madness and the violence, they both just sorta… stopped.

Jacobs thinks it’s because the prison’s architect stopped visiting. He said that one of guys who designed the prison, William H. Brown, made frequent visits up until a few years ago, like if he was checking on the vegetables he planted in his back garden. But in ‘18, something changed. Every time he visited, he looked more disappointed, showing up less and less, until he eventually stopped comin altogether.

But he wasn’t the only guy who used to visit. Apparently, it took more than one twisted mind to make a hellhole like Squirrel Cage. Brown had a partner in detaining crime named Benjamin F. Haugh. Jacobs said the older prisoners remember that back when the jail first opened, they were there all the time, bickerin bout the prison’s design. The ol’ joke is that Brown must have won the fight, because Haugh stopped coming after the first year or so. When his associate left, Brown started working with the guard more closely, which is when he started to change, and things got much bloodier.

That same guard had been working here since the prison opened, back in 1885. I thought Jacobs was lying when he told me that, but every other inmate told me the same story about who he used to be: a thick, close-cropped cop, five years from retiring, who had busted his knee in some robbery case. It was hard to imagine anything further from the ageless creature who watched us. Sometimes, late at night, I stared at the thing in the chair and tried to see the guy Jacobs and the other inmates described to me. But if there was anything left of that man, it had long been wrung out of whatever thing guarded the cells now.

The day Haugh arrived was the first time I saw that thing stand up from its chair. It was unsettlin for most of us, for a number of reasons. No one really visited the prison, unless they were the incarcerated themselves, and they came through the side entrance. So when he opened the front door, we all looked up, including the guard. For the first time, I think I saw something other than exhaustion in the guard’s eyes, something like hatred. Or maybe fear.

Haugh was a gross man, short and filthy. His features seemed to collapse in on themselves, and I’m not sure how he could see out from under the heavy folds of his brow. His nose was flat to his face and his mouth looked like the beginning of a sinkhole. His hair was matted with dirt, as were his clothes and shoes. Despite all that, there was this kinda gravity to him, and all the cellmates moved toward him, crushin each other against the bars just to get a look at the stranger.

The guard barely managed to lift a foot toward Haugh before the squat man lifted a single, crusty hand and stopped him. Without a second glance at the gangly creature, Haugh lifted his beady, sunken eyes to the dozens of inmates in front of him. As he swept his eyes across us, I felt the walls begin to close in on me. Somethin about those dark brown eyes seemed to swallow me completely, and it wasn’t until he looked away, back at the guard, that I remembered how to breathe.

Haugh turned toward the guard, eyes still scannin the walls, and spoke, in a gravelly, clipped voice. “I’m afraid that due to the recent increase in arrest rates, we are going to have to perform some significant construction on many aspects of the prison. Many parts of the design will have to be redone completely in order to increase the capacity of the building. As such, there will be a bit of a changeover in staff.” He finally turned his gaze on the guard. “I’m afraid, your services are no longer required, and you are to be severed, effectively immediately.”

The guard didn’t blink. Not that I can recall him ever blinkin before, to be truthful, but he just stared blankly at Haugh.

“Don’t worry,” Haugh said with a smile that made me feel sick. “My guy has the next shift.”

Then, for the first time in my memory, that guard spoke. Its twisted lips contorted in a way that should have been impossible for any living being, and a sound emerged from its gnarled throat. It almost resembled the word, “No.” Almost.

Haugh’s whole face crinkled, wrinkles running over his face like cracks in dry ground. “No?” he said, laughin a little. “While once, I might have welcomed the input of you and your employer, I’m afraid I’m no longer interested in your opinion. Mr. Brown has… relinquished his authority over the design of The Squirrel Cage to myself, and I’m uninterested in hearing from any of his former colleagues.”

The guard, fury in his swirling eyes, stepped toward Haugh, wrenching its mouth open as if to offer a rebuttal. Then suddenly it stumbled back, as though it had run into an invisible wall.

Haugh’s eyes turned pitch black. “I’m uninterested in hearing _anything_ from you.”

I don’t entirely know how to describe what happened next. Have you ever seen those cartoons where a mime gets stuck in an invisible box, and the box slowly starts to collapse onto the mime, until his body is all comically squished and contorted into the shape of a tiny, perfect cube? That’s sort of what happened to the guard. Only it didn’t have the advantage of bein a cartoon.

I’ve done everything I could to forget that day, but even a full fifth of whiskey can’t take the sound of that thing’s screams out of my ears. Sometimes I swear I can still hear the shatterin crunches of its bones, the wet poppin of its eyeballs and skull, and the terrible squelch that guard’s flesh made when Haugh finally released it from that invisible coffin, a quiverin mass of blood, muscle, and unidentifiable viscera. Any doubts I’d had about the guard’s humanity vanished as his all-too human brain spilled out of his skull onto the prison floor.

And then, once again, there was silence, as the former guard’s blood trickled down into the earth below.

“Yes,” said Haugh, returnin his chokin gaze to the prisoners assembled before him as the remains of the guard oozed out in front of him. “There are going to be some changes around here.”

I was lucky. I never got to see those changes. My parole hearing was the next day, and I did everything in my power to make sure I never had to go back to my tiny little room. When they told me my parole had been granted, I didn’t even go back to my cell for my things. If I did, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten buried there like everyone else.

I tried to distance myself from that place, but I would still hear stories about what happened there from friends and neighbors. As the Depression set in, the prison found itself vastly overcrowded as petty thievery like mine skyrocketed. Prisoners began to suffocate, dying of heat stroke and hypoxia. Some people even said the very walls of the prison started to swallow people up. One guy tried to escape through an emergency access shaft and got trapped in that tiny tunnel for over 72 hours. Another tried to kill himself by eating glass.

It got shut down in early ’69. For the last decade, the rotation mechanism wasn’t even workin, and prisoners were wanderin the complex at their own whim. Local newspapers reported that inmates were breakin out by diggin their way out of the walls with their bare hands, completely unsupervised. I heard the guard got trapped to one room, usin tv monitors to keep track of his inmates. Sorta ironic, I suppose, that the one who was supposed to be trappin us ended up gettin trapped himself.

I never heard from Jacobs again, or anyone else I knew there. As far as I know, I might be the only one who made it out. I looked him up in the obits the other day, and I found out he died in 1960, in the Squirrel Cage. Apparently, the rotating pillar got jammed right after he died, so his corpse got stuck there in his cell, rottin for two whole days. When they got him out, fire marshal ruled the cells “unfit for human habitation,” and, after removin the prisoners, which is why the rotation device got disabled.

His obituary said he died of “natural causes,” but I can’t help but wonder if he knew what he was doin. It was his corpse that freed the rest of the inmates from that hole. I like to think he saved them like he saved me my first day. This time he paid the ultimate price for it, though.

Cause deep down, we all knew that if you died in that place, you never got out. We all knew the guys who had died before us were wandering the halls at night, lost and mad. We’d dream about them, strange swirling things, doors opening and shutting.

It’s been years, but some nights I still have nightmares about them, trapped in that place. When I dream of Jacobs, though, it’s different. All the other inmates, they spent their eternity wandering that place in doors that corridors that never ended, but he never got to wander. No, just as sure’s I know my own name, I know Jacobs is buried in The Squirrel Cage, deep in those tiny cells, endlessly spinning in his grave.

* * *

Statement ends.

Hmmm… A prison designed in such a way that one person can watch all the inmates. Where have I heard that one before?

[CLIPPED, HUMORLESS LAUGH, AND THEN A SIGH]

It seems The Spiral was copying Jonah’s work. Not that it worked out any better for it, in the end. Marks for practicality, I suppose, if not for originality.

It sounds like an attempt at a ritual, although an altogether unimpressive one, if I may. The Squirrel Cage doesn’t hold a candle to _Our Great Twisting_. And at least Peter Lukas’s building was working as intended until Gertrude intervened. Perhaps The Spiral was still getting its foothold on the Americas back then.

Interesting that The Buried seems to have tried to walk in and steal the place from under The Spiral’s nose, though. I know the entities are competitive, but I hadn’t realized they were that ready to just… plagiarize. I suppose jails are a tidy way of generating fear. All those people together, angry, dangerous, trapped…

[SLIGHT PAUSE]

Christ, what must it be like now?

[QUIET STATIC INTERFERENCE, ACCOMPANIED BY SOUNDS OF CONFUSION]

Oh. OH, oh Christ. I-

[SLIGHT PAUSE, ACCOMPANIED BY UNSTEADY BREATHING]

I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t NEED to know.

[SHORT SILENCE, AS THE BREATHING SETTLES SLIGHTLY]

I’m- I’m going to go lay down. End recording.

[CLICK]

**Author's Note:**

> The Squirrel Cage Jail is, unfortunately, a real place, and it's pretty much exactly like I described it in the fic, minus the supernatural elements. It's now a tourist trap, literally less than five miles from my grandma's house in Council Bluffs. I've yet to visit it; after writing this fic, I'm not sure I ever will. 
> 
> If you want to read a little more, visit The Council Bluffs Historical Society page on it. There's some other reading scattered across various sites, which is notably more grim. Feel free to give it a read if you're interested in the terrible history of America's incarceration system. 
> 
> Please let me know if I have any glaring typos, and don't be afraid to leave a comment! This is my first attempt at writing fic, so I really welcome any feedback people have.


End file.
